MUTE and The Berlin Trilogy out now

As you know, the five stand-alone albums from last year’s A New Career In A New Town (1977 – 1982) (ANCIANT) box set were released today, February 23rd.

It’s also not really news to anybody who regularly visits these pages, that the wonderfully dark and quite superb Duncan Jones-directed MUTE premiered worldwide on NETFLIX today.

So how have we shoehorned that information into one item? Simple really…

MUTE is set in a Berlin 34 years into the future. Three of the five Bowie break out albums released today, Low, "Heroes" and Lodger, are collectively referred to by the misnomer: The Berlin Trilogy.

After watching MUTE, we at DBHQ noted that the music contained within the three albums runs to approximately 114 minutes and that MUTE, without the end titles and skipping to the end of the Philip Glass rendition of "Heroes" runs to a similar length. So we hit the mute button (pun obviously intended), and attempted to synch the film and the music. Alas, though there were some serendipitous moments, overall it didn’t really work.

Anyway, our montage shows Bowie in Berlin during the filming of Just A Gigolo, along with Jones the younger in a brief cameo and aforementioned Berlin Trilogy, which were joined in the record racks today by Stage 2017 and Scary Monsters.

On a final note, when the first opus of The Berlin Trilogy was released, Low, it wasn’t received so well by some of the prominent critics of the day. The public ignored the advice and the album went to #2 on the UK chart. Low remains a work very much loved by all who have taken it in.